The Other Women by Barry Kay

This is a lovely book. It is a collection of photographs of trans women in Sydney, taken by Australian photographer Barry Kay in 1974-5, published in 1976. I think I bought it in a book sale some years later for £1.00 – now it’s a rare and expensive acquisition. I hadn’t looked at it for a while and coming to it afresh I’m struck by how simply powerful the images are. Apart from the wonderful diversity of femininities – all shades of trans from transitioned to cross-dressing to female impersonation, underlining the book’s message that every trans journey is different – the book shows now, as it did to me way back when, the sheer possibility of a transgender life, even if the term transgender was not current then. In fact the now-outdated terms prompt a realization, a healthy realization, that those words and references we are so punctilious about now will one day themselves seem outdated and that we are best to exercise a degree of moderation when cancelling the past. All the pictures are in black and white and this lends to them a degree of separation from us - more so than the clothing styles or the casual cigarettes or the décor. But if these females are a world away from us they are very self-contained, secure even, in their world, at home amongst their pictures on the wall and beds and front steps and cuddly toys. I say that, but this is the mid-70’s when trans was still seen as an eccentricity or self-exile in a country awash in masculinities and testosterone and when even drag was just a fancy squall on the cultural horizon. You could be Other then, but at a price, and there’s a wariness of the camera, a guardedness, in most of these self-portrayals. It was nearly thirty years after these photographs were taken that I finally fetched up in Oz and maybe something of that defensive-assertive spirit was still there in the Sydney trans scene. It takes a long while to work the trap.